Good afternoon. Thank you for the invitation to address this committee.
My name is Matt Belliveau. I am the executive director for the NWT and Nunavut Construction Association.
The association was established in the Northwest Territories in 1976 and expanded to include Nunavut in 2012. We have about 150 members here, including general contractors, trade contractors, manufacturers and suppliers, road builders and heavy construction contractors, logistics and transportation businesses, allied professionals, and government departments and agencies working in the north.
One of the primary services that we provide to our members is a summary of public sector procurement opportunities. We assemble it, put it out twice a week, and distribute it through our member email list. This summary includes all the construction projects that are put out to tender by municipal, territorial and federal governments, as well as government agencies such as housing and power corporations.
I'm not here to speak in support of a particular infrastructure project. I did want to use this opportunity to just generally stress the importance of infrastructure investment in northern Canada.
There have been a lot of studies published on the infrastructure deficit in the territories, and this impacts core areas, including housing, transport, water, sewage and solid waste management. There is a cycle of underdevelopment in the north. The lack of infrastructure is itself a barrier to building new infrastructure.
The federal government could contribute to breaking this cycle by taking a long view of its investments in northern Canada. In particular, there is an opportunity to increase the number of skilled workers in northern Canada and lower the cost of building and maintaining infrastructure over the long term.
What do I mean by this? There are a lot of companies here in Yellowknife that take on most of the construction projects in smaller communities around the north, and when they go into these communities, they look to hire local people as apprentices. However, the situation that is happening over and over is that even a large project in one of these communities typically is going to wrap up in two years, at most. That's not long enough to complete an apprenticeship, so even though there is clearly infrastructure that needs to be built in these communities, the funding for it is just trickling in.
That means that there are long periods of time in those communities when there are no projects going on that would allow that apprenticeship to continue to completion. Those apprentices have to make a decision to either leave their community or put their apprenticeship on hold. If you put it on hold for more than a year, you have to start all over again. Either way, the result is that there continues to be a lack of skilled labour in these smaller communities, which does raise the cost of building and maintaining the infrastructure that's needed there.
If the federal government is committed to making steady progress on these local infrastructure deficits, it would create more opportunities because there would be projects going on continually over a period of time that is long enough to complete apprenticeships and build up a skilled workforce at the local level, with new journeypersons who can then train more apprentices.
Every dollar you invest in infrastructure in northern Canada does help to reduce the cost of living for residents here and makes the north more accessible for investors, who can generate more tax revenue for all of Canada.
What I'm hoping you will consider is that the federal government could benefit from efficiencies and cost savings over the long term by taking a more aggressive approach to closing northern Canada's infrastructure gap and building capacity here in the north.
Thank you.